Mark's Travels

10 years of travel blogging from 35+ countries around the world

Isolation and Immursive coding 21st October 2002 in Bremen, Germany


I"ve been missing most of my friends that I used to hangout with all the time. Problem is that were all in different locations now. I sent out some mails, hopefully I hear back soon. It"s a little isolating to be surrounded with no one that talks the same way I do. I hate it when people don"t understand me when I"m making a joke that anyone whom spoke English would of laughed at. Purhaps my German classes will change that.

I went to school today. It was a lot of fun. I learned quite a bit. Purhaps this blogg will begin to be published in Deutsch.

This afternoon until about now (Midnight) I"ve been working. Programming is immursive. I take myself out of the immursion for short periods to center myself again. I usually walk around Bremen and marvel at its beauty.

Today I began taking apart the source code for PHP because of a bug in one of the date functions. It only affects Win32 and all the linux wankers do nothing but say how it works fine on their OS. Thank god I have 5 years in C++ to solve these issues.

I remember reading the following quote (posted below) on FuckedCompany. I hope my programming skills will be a metaphor of what this individual says about CPA"s. When you write code for a living, it"s live having your head pushed into a bucket of water. You write code weather you like it or not, thankfully I like it. And when you do something for 10 hours a day, 50+ hours a week, you become very good at it, you become an expert. And after a few years of putting in 50+ hour weeks you can command high saleries because an employeer doesn"t want someone who"s fucking around and learning. They want someone who can effectively write code and get the project done on time, under budget, has specialized utilities to speed up development and doesn"t let minor bugs stop him. Thats why its such a pain in the ass to get in the programming business, there are too many good coders looking for work with all the downsizing that is going on.

If you have a budjet of ?100,000. Do you want:

(1) An amatuer programmer whom has 6 months experience and has only learned one way of developing a certain type of application with one type of tool.
e.g. Visual Basic and Office Skills (This type is very common in the generic IT schools)

or

(2) A Programmer with 5+ Years experince with experience is almost every major tool and has specialized in at least 2 or 3. e.g. There are 6 major server side languages: asp, c, coldfusion, java, perl, php. Someone who has built apps that your company is now looking to build. They have tackeled the issues before and know where bugs ly. They have had certain bugs occur and know how to solve them, thus, wasting less company time.

quote:
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No shit. But only the fatcats get away with this crap. Small and medium sized businesses get ass reamed by their CPA"s if one cent is fucking missing.


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reply:

That is largely because small and medium sized businesses want to pay a CPA $60 an hour. If you set out with that attitude you are sure to get someone with a degree from DoubleEntry Community College who passed his CPA exam after 10 years of night school. You get big by thinking big. If you spend $2500 a day on a CPA consultant from a big (n) company they will get you what you need. You will have someone who can communicate effectively with the IRS or SEC and can articulate your business. Then you will not incur those pennies problems.


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